Suburban Woods, 1993

I once held the sensation of the suburbs every night—
Held it like a crystal ball or a wooden ship
Could feel it in my grip, as sure as fingerprints

It could not be choked out by concrete;
I breathed it, or it breathed me

In the swelling of the cicada and the sweet dense heat of summer
As humidity pushed down on us, before lust took hold of us like wild dogs,
In that Siren song before the last hunt of August was over
Was awe and wonder,
We prepared for wider halls and lockers
And yet the nights still shook with mystery, when we were still ourselves

After a dance perhaps, or after the first football game in the fall, when the air was smoked in crisped September,
The woods behind my house were wild, and I was still—in the night—a child

And though I learned how we parcel out the wild and kill some part of us with every highway
Tigers still growled, burning in those pines, and the moon still swooned with song

When we walked over the hill in our first draughts of freedom,
Like birds flailing from their nests,
We could hear the sound of power in the lines, our hearts alive like them
(Couldn’t we also hear ourselves?)
And we too ran above the houses and the hedges,
Rising as we stood in the chorus of crickets,
Stars falling on Alabama and the Cahaba shaking like a wet dog beneath the stars

Some nights, tossed by storm, turned the sky to purple
And we felt desire taunting us just beyond the tree line

The skyline, then, was a stampede of horses beyond the horizon, teeming with something we could almost taste, as we paced like dogs on tethered chains

All this entered into us, like musk
This ritual
The initiation of hope and lust and blood cut from us
At that crossroads where we had to lose ourselves, undone,
Our childhood laid down

It is lost but not gone
So that
Whenever I pass the woods, after all these years
I smell it still—in my blood and in the brook
And I pause sometimes, trying to peer far enough between the limbs,
To find that wonder once again
And think I see a tiger’s eye, burning back at me, through the black night

Calling me
To that wild still there
Still ranging inside of me
In a tangle of woods and dirt and trees